The three-year Impact of Social Sciences Project has culminated in a monograph published by SAGE. The book presents thorough analysis of how academic research in the social sciences achieves public policy impacts, contributes to economic prosperity, and informs public understanding of policy issues as well as economic and social changes. This book is essential reading for academics, researchers, university administrators, government and private funders, and anyone interested in the global conversation about joining up and increasing the societal value and impact of social science knowledge and research.

“Assessing the Impacts of Academic Social Science Research: Modelling the economic impact on the UK economy of UK-based academic social science research” [PDF] A report prepared for the LSE Public Policy Group by Cambridge Econometrics.

The Impact of Social Sciences blog will continue to feature the latest discussion taking place around the new data as well as the implications this work might have on how the social sciences can communicate their work more effectively. Stay tuned!

The Impact of the Social Sciences: How Academics and Their Research Make a Difference by Simon Bastow, Jane Tinkler and Patrick Dunleavy.
University social science plays an essential role in the ‘human-dominated’ and ‘human-influenced’ systems that are central to our modern civilization. Across the world around 40 million people now work or study in university social science, or work in jobs where they ‘translate’ or mediate advances in social science research for use in business, government and public agencies, health care systems, media and civil society organizations. Yet the impacts of university social science have been under-researched, and their effectiveness often decried. Relatively little is known about the scale, diversity, and external salience of university social science research as a discipline group.

Using large-scale and in-depth research on Britain, the authors comprehensively demonstrate how the growth of a services economy and the success of previous scientific interventions, both mean that key areas of advance for corporations, policymakers and citizens alike now depend on our ability to understand and manage our complex societies and economies.

The authors break new ground in charting the scale and common features of impacts across the social sciences. They show how university research throughout this discipline group shapes public policy development, contributes to economic prosperity, plays a vital role in civil society, and critically informs public understanding of how our society and political processes work.

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[…] And it’s not just in publishing. With the rise of podcasting, universities are already substantial broadcasters – for instance, LSE podcasts have been downloaded many millions of times in 2012-13. Whatever eventually transpires around MOOCs, TV and videocast outputs from universities are already mushrooming. So universities increasingly broadcast their own work across the whole field of the cultural outputs, and they will do so far more in the next decade – partly responding to the also substantial impacts agenda (Bastow et al, 2014). […]

[…] Keep your eye on SAGE Connection for more details. In addition in the run up to is publication each of the authors will be engaging with discussions taking place around the new data presented, as well as the implications that this work could have on how the social sciences can communicate their work more effectively. Each of those posts will be published here on SAGE Connection as well as on the LSE Impact blog post here. […]

[…] for anyone interested in public policy impacts of research. As we have shown in our recent book The Impact of the Social Sciences, there has been precious little data available that allows us to compare systematically what […]

[…] actually just published a book (with co-authors) on how academic work has an impact on policy-making. So this is an interesting little incident to add to the picture, illustrating the problems of […]

[…] actually just published a book (with co-authors) on how academic work has an impact on policy-making. So this is an interesting little incident to add to the picture, illustrating the problems of […]

[…] The Impact of the Social Sciences: How Academics and Their Research Make a Difference by Simon Bastow, Jane Tinkler and Patrick Dunleavy. Find this book: The three-year Impact of Social Sciences … […]

[…] Centenary Research Professor at the University of Canberra, Australia. His most recent books are The Impact of the Social Sciences (co-authored, Sage, 2014) and Growing the Productivity of Government Services (co-authored, Edward […]

[…] Centenary Research Professor at the University of Canberra, Australia. His most recent books are The Impact of the Social Sciences (co-authored, Sage, 2014) and Growing the Productivity of Government Services (co-authored, Edward […]

[…] Centenary Research Professor at the University of Canberra, Australia. His most recent books are The Impact of the Social Sciences (co-authored, Sage, 2014) and Growing the Productivity of Government Services (co-authored, […]

[…] your key messages to a far wider groups beyond academia itself. Thus it helps to create external impact for your work amongst practitioners in government or business or the professions as well. An LSE […]

[…] For the social sciences and nearby humanities subjects, some related information for the social sciences can be found in : Simon Bastow, Patrick Dunleavy and Jane Tinkler, ‘The Impact of the Social Sciences ’ (Sage, 2014) or the Kindle edition. You can also read the first chapter for free and other free materials are here. […]

[…] your key messages to a far wider groups beyond academia itself. Thus it helps to create external impact for your work amongst practitioners in government or business or the professions as well. An LSE […]

[…] your key messages to a far wider groups beyond academia itself. Thus it helps to create external impact for your work amongst practitioners in government or business or the professions as well. An LSE […]

[…] Beyond that what more can we say? Well, there is an interesting and extremely expensive monograph published in 2012 by Stefanie Hauser called, Multi-dimensional Journal Evaluation. I have tried to extract from this (as best I can) the factors that seem to have proven relevance to the choices most researchers will be considering. I have combined information from the factors she tested for with a wide range of factors mentioned to research colleagues or me as relevant to a recent research project on The Impact of the Social Sciences, which also included some STEM academics (for some free-to-view materials on this please visit the web page). […]

[…] Our search focused on various social science disciplines (including psychology – we followed Bastow et al. here and regard this as a social science/STEM crossover discipline) but paid particular attention […]

[…] your key messages to a far wider groups beyond academia itself. Thus it helps to create external impact for your work amongst practitioners in government or business or the professions as well. An LSE […]

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